


Another Odyssey

by jrench



Category: Smosh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21924814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jrench/pseuds/jrench
Summary: Inspired by the Assasin's Creed: Odyssey videos from a while ago- a short few scenes from a Classical Antiquity AU.
Kudos: 4





	Another Odyssey

**Author's Note:**

> for @mari-takahashi-isthebest-yall 's secret santa (i know it's not the way you're supposed to share it, we worked something out!)

She looked out through the greying columns at the trees, air, ocean. The sky was bright and the sun touched everything. She scanned through it all- the ebbing of the forest-cap, the elation of the sun’s reach, and the tumbling mass of water and people elsewhere. Here, on top of it all, she let her eyes rest on what she could see.

For a moment.

“Mari,” A voice- kind. Familiar. “My friend. The soldiers are gathering to leave. We plan on setting out once everyone has boarded.” A pause. “Wesley sent for you personally.”

Mari broke herself from her meditation and turned to face the stout, older man who had trained her.

“Joven,” her voice like fire blackening tall grasses, down through to the root, “Thank you. I had thought to tell you I would be here, but I assumed correctly you would find me without.”

He smiled, _such kindness, old man, to someone who deserves none_. “It has become my duty to be your keeper, miss.”

“By whose decision?”

“My own.”

\---------------------------------------

She sat through it. Words, fire, laughing.

The men surrounding her kept her attention, not what they were saying. So it was night, and the stars above them spoke loudly and without end. Around their own burning light they looked endlessly alive. Like children playing in grass, each was covered in ego and his own worth. The chatter around her was brilliant in its joy, as every man took his turn recounting the time he took the spotlight they covetted in battle- the final blow, the cunning move, the furious leap. She could see it was inspiring, to be around those whom death had not touched. 

Joven sat beside her, ever attentive to her slightest movement. As she surveyed the camp, he kept his focus closer, moving only to find them meat and a fur to keep them warm.

Wesley came to speak to them at some point, with a small following of warriors behind him.

“Mari of Sparta, blessed she whom Athena finds grace upon, I am honored to fight alongside you when dawn breaks.” He turns a white, godly face into a smiling one, holding out his hand.

She took it.

“Honor is a line in the sand. Drawn by a child. I will overstep it.” Her words mingle with the smoke and disperse accordingly. 

A smart man, he knew debate when it jarred him. “Honor is how men live. It’s a road in the dark through broken country.” The men behind him stirred, agreeing.

“Why walk a road when the dark is there, its cold fathomless and welcoming? A hundred, a thousand, a million lives are not, in the balance, any one man.”

For the group he says, “Does it ease your heart to outrage the dead?”

Then, in a whisper only for them, “Does your lost friend feel closer?”

It was all hers. Night, wind, fury.

Silence. Then, “If honor is empty, then what? Why show restraint? Why should I let anyone live?”

_Ah. He is a young man, then. Still arrogant._

She held his gaze, and then spoke. “There are laws older than honor. Simple, animal things. A friend dies, and your rage burns white hot, and then it fades. You make their pyre, and send them down into the shadows to the sound of your weeping. you honor their memory and you hope that it will fade.”

Suddenly a vision comes to her. His red, red hair moving like a serpent along the field, twisting and turning with death coming right behind him, playing catch-up. His face an unyielding stare, holding each eyes with the glory of being the last thing they see. The menace. The father. The friend.

“Sometimes,” her voice wavers, “you see them when you sleep.”

Wesley, she flicks her eyes back to him, is calmer now. A student to her, he listens. 

“In the end, there are other things. The first light of dawn. The rhythms of the year. A wind touching the sea. A kindness to a broken stranger.”

By morning she was dauntless. Tonight she was guided back to her tent and left to rest. 

\--------------------------------------

Somewhere a city is burning.

Another night on the walls of Argos, cloak clutched against the wind, staring into the dark. Across the harbor is the blackness of a mountain on whose slopes a red light sparks, flickers, flares. It’s the signal-fire, cold this last decade. It sends smoke into the stars’ density, the radiant center of night here.

She moves slightly to perch on the wall. Simple to climb, the city’s walls were cosmetic, vulnerable to war. She imagines what the people must be like here, to be so trusting. She imagines elegant women, hair done in all kinds of fashions, moving in white silks across clean floors.

The muscles around her calves tense and release as she rocks back and forth. She thinks of careening down through the night air, after a jump. Joven speaks from behind her.

“I see a patrol coming,” He moves closer.

“We need to go,” Almost saying something else. Clever.

She pivots, jumps and throws herself down the rope they fixed on the outer wall. belaying herself down, with each kick off the wall, she suspends her disbelief to make them last longer, to keep her body in freefall.

On the ground, she hoods her cloak and passes like an animal in the night, her breath catching starlight in whites and grays before dispersing.

\----------------------------------

It was a trickle, the beginning. Small parties were deployed to the least secure parts of the wall, given orders to ascend and demolish. Mari and Joven stalked alongside three other soldiers through the orderly morning, the birds singing their everyday songs. Nothing was out of place.

Once inside, her team made their way along the perimeter in single file, which was used by guards for patrols. Their front man moved a few paces ahead, and she, near the back, counted 5 bodies bloodied as they passed. Maintaining stealth was priority. During a period of rest, she reached back and caught Joven’s hands, then his eyes. Sitting with their backs against the wall, hoods blocking most of their silhouettes, they managed a glance in the dark of dawn, and as she took in the dust and sweat in her lungs she felt at peace.

Their trip around the perimeter felt long, but the sun had only reached blue-grey out into the morning when they descended the wall and moved towards the back of a small palace. 

From there it was slaughter. 

At almost exactly the same time, Mari turned a corner, making eye contact with a young guard, couldn’t have been more than his first year, his skin was still soft, still pleasing to the eye, and a scream went up across the city, a warning. Mari took a moment longer to see the boy. She imagined someone holding his soft blonde head in their lap, his eyes bleeding blue onto his sun-burned face in the light of an endless summer day, and she stepped forward in a second, cutting this throat and letting him drop before running forward and into the building.

She could hear her companions behind her, but only just- the shouting and slamming and white noise of fighting almost drowned them out. Three other small parties had made their way into the castle from various entrances and she could hear them through the walls, slashing and hitting steel against stone. She shed her cloak as an afterthought after a thought hit her, an image of her dragged back by a faceless enemy, her face scraping the floor. And then suddenly she was free and lightning. She took the stairs three at a time when they appeared in front of her, and the map she had studied over candlelight came back to her as she pictured it in front of her, guiding her through the maze. Her small party had caught the tail ends of other’s journeys, and in small moments she saw life leave tired eyes, and she ran on, through stone and colored curtains. The women did not wear white, here, she imagined. But she had not seen any women.

Eventually she turned to consult her party and found only Joven, bruised and exhausted. He was huffing air and holding one shoulder with too much effort. He caught her eyes and gave her a small nod, that he was alright, that they needed to keep moving. She wondered if she looked like that. She wondered when they had fought inside the castle. She looked down to find her sword in her hand. all of a sudden her muscles, the ones stretching down her arms and down the backs of her legs, felt spent. When she started running again, it was hard to move.

The king’s court itself was small. This was a quiet city, wealthy only a bit, enough for a weak man without ambition.

It was quiet. The man was seated, his head hung low, his daughters cowering behind his throne. Mari stepped to him, letting the cloth of her clothes catch the light, a threat.

He lifted his face, and she noticed her looked older, not quite elder yet, but certainly not a soldier. She wondered how he had looked so long ago, when he was at his prime, when his prowess was marvelled at and a great challenge, and she wondered how he had survived. He knew her when he met her eyes. She could see it, how she looked like the woman he remembered, screaming over the body of her comrade, calling upon strength, upon fury, upon vengeance. And then he turned his eyes back down, set his lips tight, and wondered.  
“It was so long ago now,” He broke a silence within her and without, “I still remember his eyes,”

He paused and let the tone of the room fill back up, and Mari paused as she caught the sniffing of his daughters, the clang of swords, the tumult of a battle outside that they transcended. He spoke again.

“He was fierce. I thought he would be. But it’s different to see him than to hear the stories,”

He took her glance, “He was unimaginable.” 

Slowly but without pausing, she stepped toward him, reached out and grasped him- his skin thin and easily pierced. As in bad dreams it seems to do him no harm, and he grabs at her and backhands her in the face, something cracks in her nose. But she has lived this moment before, as as she yanks back his head by his hair and looks into the pained expression of his staring eyes, she’s shrieking obscenities, sailors curses she didn’t know she knew, and then the knife clinks onto stone as his life spurts away onto the throne.

Something rises in her, and it seems that this must be the end, that the world must come apart now, and she embraces this, but her heart slows and the fire that filled her fades into nothing and she’s standing there, her dress soaked, watching the corpse float in thick red water, David these ten years dead.


End file.
